Tag Archives: Thoughts

Bad Mobile Manners Lead To Rage

Posted by Steven Swafford on February 27, 2011

A new poll conducted by Intel reveals that our mobile manners are decreasing. This isn’t shocking. However, there are a few stats that are shocking. This poll surveyed 2,000 people. Of the 2,000 people surveyed, 91% of them stated that they believed our “mobile manners” are decreasing year after year. When asked if they had poor mobile manners, only 20% of them replied yes.

Upon ready the survey I must say that I was not surprised to see the results. I’m not saying that I condone the use rather that I see such poor manners each and every day.

2011 Intel Mobile Poll Results

Let me ask you this. Have you ever walked into your local grocery store, favorite restaurant, or stopped to get gas only to have someone standing in front of you with a cell phone glued to their ear? I’m sure you have and you most likely you was in a hurry only to realize the idiot on the phone has no care in the world except for the conversation happening in their own little world. Here is an idea, the next technology breakthrough should come in the form a killing cell phone signals as soon as you enter a business establishment

Do you fall into the 91% of folks that bring other to the edge of rage? What annoying mobile habits of people do you see that bother you? If you have a story that just drive you nuts, leave a comment and share the horror with others.

The Fun And Sad Times Of A Software Developer’s Life

Posted by Steven Swafford on October 28, 2010

If you’re thinking of joining the ranks of developers’ let this be a warning to you. I will leave the decision up to you as to if you think becoming a developer is still a good idea after you watch the following videos.

I can speak to my own experience that the life is a mixed bag of tricks and definitely has its ups and downs, but I would not trade it for anything in the world. Well except for maybe a promotion!

Sadness

Removing Barriers

Fun

Real Intelligence

Working With Others

Skilled Communications

Life And Death Decisions

As you have saw, a software developer’s life is unique to say the very least. Do you have what it takes?

Five Free Technical eBook Sites

Posted by Steven Swafford on February 18, 2010

If you are anything like me free is good and free technical books are better. Over the years I had collected a number of printed material and more often than not I always end up donating the books to organizations that can better use the material rather than sitting on my bookshelf and collecting dust. I thought I would share ten sites that I am familiar with. Are you aware of anything that you may be willing to share? If so, please leave a comment.

FreeTechBooks

This site lists free online computer science, engineering and programming books, textbooks and lecture notes, all of which are legally and freely available over the Internet.

Zillr.org

This site lists free online computer science, engineering and programming books.

FreeComputerBooks

Consists of a huge collection of Free online Computer, Programming, Mathematics, Engineering, and Technical Books, Lecture Notes and Tutorials. It is very well categorized by topics, with 12 top level categories, and over 150 sub-categories. It has both pattern and keywords search engines for you to find the titles quickly.

OnlineFreeEBooks

The most imitated free ebook site.

Free Programming Books

Here is a categorized list of online programming books available for free download. The books cover all major programming languages: Ada, Assembly, Basic, C, C#, C++, CGI, JavaScript, Perl, Delphi, Pascal, Haskell, Java, Lisp, PHP, Prolog, Python, Ruby, as well as some other languages, game programming, and software engineering.

Do you have a favorite resource? If so what is it?

Tools of the Trade: February 2010

Posted by Steven Swafford on February 1, 2010

As a software engineer there are a number of tools that I use on a daily basis to both increase productivity and make my job easier. Each month I will discuss products that I either currently use, have used in the past, and what I am hearing is the next best product.

Products may include but are not limited to shareware, freeware, commercial, and open source. I will not be targeting any on aspect of software engineering rather I will suggest tools and products that can also make you much more productive in your day to day activities.

Redgate .NET Reflector

Cost: Free

This is a gem and I have been using it for many years going back to the days when Lutz Roeder owned this product before turning it over to Redgate. Kudos for Redgate on maintaining this product and keeping it free!

Description: NET Reflector enables you to easily view, navigate, and search through the class hierarchies of .NET assemblies, even if you don’t have the code for them. With it, you can decompile and analyze .NET assemblies in C#, Visual Basic, and IL.

Feature List:

  1. Full support for .NET 1.0, 1.1, 2.0, 3.0, and 3.5
  2. Windows Shell Integration – Run Reflector.exe /register to register file extension
  3. Assembly lists for .NET 1.0, 1.1, 2.0, 3.0, 3.5, Compact Framework 2.0, Compact Framework 3.5, XNA framework, Silverlight, Mono, and Direct X for Managed Code
  4. Click navigation of source code
  5. Find where types are exposed or instantiated
  6. Expand methods
  7. Linq query expression support
  8. Lambda expression support
  9. Anonymous methods and nullable type support
  10. Extension method support
  11. Context-sensitive documentation view
  12. Find virtual method overrides
  13. Code URL support – Navigate to code://mscorlib/System.Object in IE
  14. Explore resources in assemblies

Summary:

If you ever find yourself needing to peek inside an assembly then I believe you will be hard pressed to find a comparable product for the same cost (which is FREE). Also another benefit is the ability to to incorporate a number of useful add-ins found at the CodePlex community. If you have never used Reflector then I highly suggest taking the time to evaluate this product.

Ghostdoc

Cost: Free

Description: GhostDoc is a free Visual Studio extension that automatically generates XML documentation comments for methods and properties based on their type, parameters, name, and other contextual information. When generating documentation for class derived from a base class or for interface implementation (e.g. .NET Framework or your custom framework), GhostDoc will use the documentation that Microsoft or the framework vendor has already written for the base class or interface. Originally owned by Roland Weigelt, he turned this product over to SubMain who has pledged to maintain and distributed the product free of charge.

Feature List:

  1. Generates XML comments based on code element type, parameters, name, and other contextual information
  2. For a derived class uses the base class documentation
  3. Assignable shortcut (default Ctrl-Shift-D)
  4. Configurable rules, acronyms and macros
  5. Import/Export of the configuration and the rules
  6. Option to re-build documentation

Summary:

If you are documenting your work and you know that you should be then this product can greatly assist in completing this task. It is simple to install and better yet it is very simple to use. Do not miss this one!

JetBrains Resharper

Cost: Free – $349

Description: ReSharper provides solution-wide error highlighting on the fly, instant solutions for found errors, over 30 advanced code refactorings, superior unit testing tools, handy navigation and search features, single-click code formatting and cleanup, automatic code generation and templates, and a lot more productivity features for C#, VB.NET, ASP.NET, XML, and XAML.

Feature List:

Check out the detailed Feature Map for yourself.

Summary:

Bottom line is you write code within the Visual Studio .NET IDE then you really should give this product a look and determine if it is a fit. While there are similar products in the market, I find myself turning back to Resharper time and time again.

Balsamiq UI Mockup

Cost: Free – $79

Description: This product I ran across while reading the January 2010 edition of MSDN Magazine in Scott Mitchell’s Toolbox editor. I have not tried this product myself but I intend to do so in the near future. Using Balsamiq Mockups feels like you are drawing, but it’s digital, so you can tweak and rearrange controls easily, and the end result is much cleaner. Teams can come up with a design and iterate over it in real-time in the course of a meeting. Product managers, designers, developers and even clients can now work together in the same tool to quickly iterate over software mockups, before writing code.

Feature List:

  1. Fast, intuitive user interface
  2. Seventy-Five Ready-to-Use Controls
  3. Shortcuts Everywhere
  4. Property Inspectors: Always Nearby, Never in Your Way
  5. Unlimited Undo and Redo

Summary:

As Scott stated, you can use other such as Microsoft Visio or Visual Studio Designer, but showing non-technical stakeholders a polished mockup may lead them to believe the work is nearly done.

This product looks to be very promising. The fact that these mockups look as though they were hand drawn is impressive. Balsamiq offers an engaged user community, robust help and tutorials, as well as frequently asked questions.

Have you personally used any of these products? If so, how have they helped you? Do you have a tool that you just cannot live without, then leave a comment and share it with others.

Printer Friendly Web Pages

Posted by Steven Swafford on January 30, 2010

While I personally do print a great deal of web pages I do find myself from time to time running across an article that I want to to keep and a bookmark is something I do not want to use. Print is something that you can file away to ensure that the information is available to you at any point in time.

The one thing that drives me nuts is those sites that do not provide printer friendly versions of content or if they do it contains logos and other unnecessary images.

Everyone has their own idea when it comes to this topic and while I tend to lean to 100% text when it comes to printer friendly pages there are exceptions to this rule. Just use common sense in this area and you will do fine. Take the following as good example of 100% text:

How To Implement Printer Friendly Pages

There are a number of ways you can do this and I will touch on two.

  1. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)
  2. Third Party Sources

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)

A print style sheet works basically in the same manner as the screen type with a slight difference which is to exclude the content that you do not want to be printed and setting the appropriate media type. Once you have your stylesheet in place all the remains is to reference this stylesheet in your web pages, for example:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="print.css" type="text/css" media="print" />

In this case the print.css may be represented by:

/* Remove unwanted elements */
#header, #nav, #sidebar
{
display: none;
}

/* Ensure the content spans the full width */
#container, #body, #content
{
width: 100%; margin: 0; float: none;
}

/* Improve color of links */
a:link, a:visited
{
color: #781351
}

As you see by employing CSS it is not difficult to give your readers a medium to print content without them have to spend their hard earned case on ink.

Third Party Sources

If you are like I am and do not want to reinvent the wheel there are a number of third party resources you can use to accomplish the same goal as CSS all without the additional overhead of doing the actual work. One of my absolute favorites is Instapaper which handles a number of mediums that include computer, paper, mobile devices, and the Kindle. While I am a heavy user of Instapaper there are others you may also find useful.

Conclusion

Printer friendly web pages in many cases is a must and if you have not implemented such a solution to enhance your readers experience then what are you waiting for? It is not a difficult nor a time consuming process and the payoff is worth its weight in gold.

What have you found works best for you? Do you employ CSS or is there a service that does the job for you? Please take a moment a share any resource that you are aware of so others may evaluate it to determine its merit.

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